Poirot and Holmes

For the whole of my kids’ lives, my wife and I have read aloud to them. They’re about 3 years apart, so for a few years, we split the kids up and read littler kid stuff to my son and bigger kid stuff to my daughter. I’ve tended to prefer to read things at a level above what I’d expect my kids to understand on their own, and I explain and we talk things through as needed. This is fun sometimes, like when you’re reading the Bobbsey Twins to your 4 or 5 year old and are confronted with explaining not only things like what Obsidional coins are, but also what veiled racism and unfortunate parody of stereotypes and entrenched classism are.

As my son got a little older, we were able to read more together as a family rather than splitting up. We’ve read things like the Harry Potter series, The Lord of the Rings, the Prydain Chronicles, and lots of other stuff. It’s a family activity that we all look forward to, and reading aloud to my kids is one of my very favorite things to do.

A couple of years ago, when we had exhausted a lot of the books I was willing to read and were looking for something classic, I decided to try some Sherlock Holmes. We got a collection of Doyle’s stories and novels and dug in. My son was less interested than my daughter, though he hung on through a couple of novels and a number of stories, but eventually my daughter and I split the Sherlock stories off and read those together separately from the family reading.

They’re kind of a mixed bag. Some of the stories are really neat, but others you read and feel just kind of meh about. As with the Bobbsey Twins books, there are some anachronisms that need explaining, and there’s the occasional drug use (Holmes liked cocaine) to talk about, not to mention lots of murder. Mostly we’ve enjoyed the experience of reading about Sherlock, though.

Having exhausted most of those, we this year decided to give Agatha Christie’s Poirot stories a try. I had never read anything at all by Christie. We were struck right away by how similar the Poirot/Hastings and Holmes/Watson setup and dynamic are. The stories are darned near interchangeable if you just swap the character names out and substitute in some of Sherlock’s stock phrases for some of Poirot’s French phrases. In one of the stories we read last night, Christie makes a direct reference to Holmes, which was kind of neat to encounter. We’ve read a half dozen or so of the Poirot stories, and on the whole, I think I’ve enjoyed the Sherlock stories more, but there’s plenty more Poirot to read, and there’s been plenty to enjoy in what we’ve read of Poirot (I especially liked “Wasp’s Nest,” which we read last night).

It did my heart good that last night, I offered to turn on a Doctor Who episode we haven’t watched yet, and my son cried out for a Poirot instead. I’d still like to watch the Doctor Who, and so would the kids, but I’ll favor falling into a book over staring at a screen 100% of the time.